Dry soup maker stands up the envelope

In the dry soup category&#44 packaging tends to be either printed or labeled cups or envelopes in a carton. Sahara Natural Foods&#44 San Leandro&#44 CA&#44 has combined the advantages of both.

Its new Casbah® line of Teapot Soups(TM) are packed in lightweight pouches that stand on a shelf. They retail for 79¢.

"Since we wanted to position this line against soups packaged in paper cups we wanted it to stand up like cups" says Dimitri Cados president of Sahara. "And we wanted a principal display panel at least as large as a cup." The answer is a gusseted pouch of paper/polyethylene litho printed in five colors by Lithotype Co. (South San Francisco CA).

Along with delivering a stand-up package with a good display panel it may be the smallest pouch ever to get a gusset. Rollstock is formed and filled on a horizontal packager from Klockner Bartelt (Sarasota FL) that's fitted with what Cados calls a proprietary filler. It permits up to six ingredients to be filled separately Cados says.

The pouch is made of 55# paper/15# low-density polyethylene and Cados claims it offers six months' shelf life. It also allows the front panel to point out that the pouch requires 84% less packaging than dry soup in a cup. And Cados should know Sahara also makes other products in paper cups. "If this Teapot Soups package becomes successful we'd like to phase out the cups" he says.